


to turn your back on what you're given

by Thingsareswinging



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: soul mark au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 20:05:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7282876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thingsareswinging/pseuds/Thingsareswinging
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Which The Heavens Dictate That Two Unlikely People Should Get To Know Each Other Better,</p><p>or,</p><p>The inevitable Soul Mark AU. All Loopy's fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to turn your back on what you're given

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loopy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loopy/gifts).



Mai was pretty sure her Capital-W Words weren't why her parents were disappointed with her. Sure, ‘Stay back I've got a machete and I'm not afraid to use it’ running up the inside of her left forearm wasn't the _most_ auspicious of sentences, but there had been worse, and at least she wasn't one of those confused people with ‘hi’ stuck on their wrist for all eternity.

Azula, popular rumour had it, had no Words, because she was so devoted to her country that no lesser entity could place any claim on her heart. Mai figured that was as good an explanation as any, as long as you didn't pay too much attention to the precise, aged burn scar on the back of the Princess’s calf. Royals did weird things, Mai wasn't about to judge.

Ty Lee, for her part, had somehow failed to track down Get Off What Did You Do To Me yet, which Mai took as proof that there had to be something to the whole Words stuff after all.

So the three of them had just kind of gravitated together at school- privately Mai was pretty sure Azula had liked how both her and Ty Lee’s Words had implied violence, which was pretty fair- and so, technically, Mai’s Words were her ticket into the Palace. Even if Prince Zuko had never mentioned machetes.

* * *

 

Sokka’s Words were kind of a source of sympathetic looks and definitely a fuel for paranoia, but Katara’s were worse. Sure, if you were the kind of guy who looked on the miserable side of life, ‘this doesn’t mean I’m going to stop’ was a cause for real concern, but he’d got off pretty lightly compared to his sister, who’d been saddled with ‘stop running away we have a connection’.

Aang, the lucky kid, had no Words at all- an Avatar thing, apparently.

* * *

 

Sokka backed up against a tree as the one in black descended like something with _way too many flying knives_. Fortunately it looked like she only had darts and stuff that went in a straight line so he wasn’t dead yet which was _great_ , he _loved_ not being dead, but sooner or later he was going to screw up- _duck_ \- and she seemed pretty comfortable staying where he couldn’t hit her - _block low-_ and it’d be so nice if he could get half a second to get boomerang in play but - _roll and scramble for the river-_ it looked like splitting up had been a bad idea.

Backup would be great but it looked like Katara had her own problems- she was cradling one arm and yelling at the pink one, which seemed like it wasn’t going to do much.

Or… it was? Whatever she’d said seemed to make the pink one stop and think and reconsider her place in the universe or whatever seemed to be happening there. Katara, in what had to be the smartest move he’d ever seen her make, took the opportunity to run. Pink, blinking, suddenly remembered what she was doing or something, and pursued, yelling after her.

It took Sokka a second to realise that he had watched that whole exchange without getting filled with a whole bunch of superfluous puncture wounds. Apparently the one in black had been as confused by that whole scene as he was?

* * *

 

Right, well. _That_ had happened.

Mai had always figured Ty Lee’s taste was pretty dubious, but ‘she said my Words while we were trying to kill each other’ had to be a new low. If Mai were the petty sort, she’d _definitely_ never let Ty Lee forget that one.

Speaking of, Water Tribes guy was moving. He had to be pretty distracted right about now, considering Mai had got within a few feet of him without him noticing.

Anyway. Knife in the ribs or something, that was how this was meant to go, right? Just pick a spot and stab.

Before she could so much as move, he whipped around, drawing that big ugly knife that he’d been using to bat her darts out of the air (how could he _do_ that? _Why_ could he do that?) and scrambled backwards.

“Stay back!” he snapped. “I’ve got a machete and I’m not afraid to use it!”

...She should really have seen that one coming.

* * *

 

Sokka had not been expecting the knife girl to freeze up in response to his not-all-that-impressive threat, but that had, in fact, been what happened. Maybe she had a morbid fear of blades larger than the average thumb?

In any case, he was definitely grateful to Appa for the save.

* * *

 

“Look at it this way,” Sokka said later, with a complete lack of sympathy, as Katara buried her face in her hands, “at least she’s pretty.”

“I will harm you,” Katara mumbled, as Aang and Toph tried not to look like they were listening. “I will _injure_ you.”

* * *

 

After everything was over and Mai and Ty Lee had changed into some dry clothes, Azula fixed the two of them with a glare until Ty Lee explained, with what Mai considered quite miserable enthusiasm.

Azula’s brow furrowed, deliberately, while Mai very carefully didn’t wince.

“ _Well_ ,” the Princess said, drily. “Congratulations to the both of you.”

Mai would have been perfectly happy if in that moment a rock had fallen from the sky and crushed at least one of them to death.

* * *

 

Some days nobody tried to kill him at all, which was something he’d taken for granted so often growing up, but now he cherished the fleeting moments when he could simply wander around a market looking at bags and get really annoyed at the young man who was walking slower than glacial drift.

“Excuse me,” Sokka mumbled, ducking by, only for the guy to spin round, arms wide, with a look of divine revelation.

“It’s you!” he hollered, loud enough that heads turned all around the market. “I’ve been waiting so long!”

Sokka sighed. One of _these_ guys again.

“Nope, sorry,” he replied, trying to walk on as unobtrusively as possible, before something occurred to him. “Hang on, is that your, I don’t know, _thing_? Walk around as slowly as possible so’s people have to say ‘excuse me’ to get around you?”

“...No?” the man replied, guiltily. Sokka shook his head and moved on as quickly as he could.

* * *

 

Mai was pretty sure that someone had put way too much of the military’s budget into doom machines. Odds were good it was War Minister Qin, who had invested in a giant drill rather than a bunch of ladders or something.

Suddenly, an alarm sounded, heralding intruders in the drill.

Finally. Something to do.

* * *

 

They’d been squaring off against the Avatar and his two cronies and Mai had been doing a _great_ job of not looking at That Guy until he’d drawn his machete and batted her knives away _again_ and Mai might have sworn just a little.

Azula turned her head, from Mai, perched on the metal crossbeam, to the barbarian, blade drawn. The Princess tilted her head as she noted the heft of the tribesman’s weapon, and the pieces slid into place.

“Oh yes,” she sighed, eventually. “Knock him out or something, and we can take him with us when we go.”

“ _Excuse me_?” the boy screeched, indignantly. Mai studiously ignored him.

“Anyway I’ll let you two get on,” Azula continued. “I have to go stop the Avatar.”

“Will someone _tell me what is going on?_ ”

* * *

 

Okay Aang had gone up top to cap the front end and Katara had been chased away by the pink one but she knew to get to the bottom to meet up with Toph so everything was going okay except he’d taken a wrong turn or fallen behind or something and all these corridors looked the same and it wasn’t like he had time to ask for directions because the one with the knives was catching-

Right in front of him. She was right in front of him.

Slightly behind her, he could see the hatch to the slurry pipeline, and not-death.

So he’d almost made it. He could feel good about that, at least?

* * *

 

Mai closed her eyes. Right. This was it. Whatever she said _right now_ would somehow turn out to have been indelibly written somewhere on his body, because the universe was awful.

She resisted the urge to say something completely nonsensical, just to retroactively give him the worst tattoo in history.

“Uh… you’re just... standing there. With your eyes closed. While I stand here. With a machete? Is this a really unorthodox surrender? And what was your friend talking about earlier?”

Someone _hated_ her. She opened her eyes, and let a knife fall into her hand.

“This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop,” she warned, by way of explanation.

* * *

 

Sokka took a long breath.

Oh. Okay.

On the plus side: not the _most_ creepy context he could have heard his Words.

“So,” he exhaled. “What now?”

The girl didn’t seem to know any better than he did. “We have a sensible conversation like rational people?”

“See that's not a horrible idea but I like this one better: we don’t do that, and instead I run away from you and your friends.”

Before she had a chance to respond he barrelled past her, diving head-first for the hatch and vanishing into the swirling muck.

 _Flawless_.

* * *

 

Mai, alone in the corridor, wondered if she should be offended that that was his response to talking to her. Instead, she just closed the hatch.

* * *

 

“Katara, I think I owe you an apology.”

* * *

 

The Forbidden Palace might have been the most boring place since Omashu, but it _did_ have one thing Mai sorely needed: a library.

She had some research to do. Or rather, she had some easily-cowed librarians to terrorise into doing some research for her. Preferably ones that wouldn’t ask why a Kyoshi Warrior was looking up literature on Words.

“You,” she said, bearing down on a particularly mousy-looking specimen. “I need you to get some books for me.”

The librarian paused, brows furrowed, and looked down, reading something off the palm of her hand.

She looked up at Mai again, eyes widening. “Did you say ‘I need you to get me some books?’” she asked, hopefully.

Mai sighed. “No.”

“Oh, never mind. What was it you were looking for?”

* * *

 

“Aang, I appreciate the offer, but I really don’t want to have to face my Dad right now,” Sokka admitted.

“Why?” the Avatar asked, as if he actually couldn’t figure it out.

Sokka pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’ll be a whole _thing_ \- ‘hey Dad guess what I heard my Words a couple weeks ago’ ‘well gee Sokka I’m so proud of you when can I meet them’ ‘see that’s the thing they’re a Fire Nation girl who _keeps trying to kill me.’_ I’d rather put that conversation off a few decades if at all possible.”

Beside him, Katara nodded, miserably. “Yeah. We’ll just stay here. You have fun though.”

Aang shrugged. “Well, okay. Yip, yip!”

* * *

 

Mai could hardly believe it. Finally, _vindication_.

It was _all Oma and Shu’s fault_. It was _them_ that started this stupid Words stuff, and it was _them_ that got some bored Spirit to curse (and it _was_ a curse, no question about that) the rest of humanity apparently forever, because… because Spirits get bored easily, or something.

Admittedly the fact that it was all Omashu’s fault was a nice thing to realise, but unfortunately there didn’t seem to be much written about what to do if the person who said your Words was a foreigner with stupid hair who you were at war with. Impossibly, everyone who had ever written anything on the subject (or at least, those whose works had got to the Earth King) seemed to think that Words were a _good_ thing.

* * *

 

The three of them stared down at the waterbender’s immobilised form. Ty Lee was very nearly bouncing with excitement. Azula smirked. Mai considered the merits of drowning herself in an ornamental pond.

“A thought occurs to me, Mai,” Azula announced. “If _she_ is here, then _your_ destined lover cannot be far. I believe we can afford to take a detour.”

Mai knew there was no way out of this one, and she had jettisoned pride as being too much like work.

“Fine.”

* * *

 

“You know,” Sokka said, as the cell door clicked shut behind Azula, “is it just me, or is your friend weirdly into getting us together?”

Knives girl sighed. “Azula’s big on divine mandate.”

“Oh. Ew.”

“Yeah.”

Silence descended on the room, and Sokka wondered what exactly he’d done to deserve this. Maybe Aang was right, and vegetarianism _was_ key to a virtuous life.

“So…” he ventured, to a complete lack of visible reaction. “No offense but this is not my idea of a good first date? Which I’m guessing means you’re about as happy about all this as I am?”

“All I’ve ever wanted out of life is to be inextricably bound to a manic Water Tribes barbarian that keeps trying to kill me.”

“Okay, so we understand each other. So here’s my amazing plan: we don’t do _anything_. No deep conversations, no star-crossed devotion, I don’t even want to know your _name._  We don’t do the whole tempestuous passions kept apart by the tides of war thing and we _definitely_ don’t do the tragic lovers forced to kill each other on the battlefield thing. I’ll ignore you if you ignore me, and it’ll totally show all those weird Spirits and your creepy friend that set us up like this. You and me against the Universe, what do you say?”

Knives held his gaze for an uncomfortably long moment, before shrugging. “I’m game.”

He sagged with relief, and nodded. “Great.”

The two settled into weirdly comfortable silence, as Sokka examined, and discarded, possible avenues of escape, more for something to do than any actual realistic hope.

Really, all he had to do was wait. Aang’d figure out self-actualisation eventually and come rescue him, he was pretty sure. In the meantime all he had to do was sit here, think about all the ways a door could be broken open if he had loads of specialised tools, and ignore the pretty girl sitting in the corner while she ignored him.

Easy.

* * *

 

The boat back to the Fire Nation was kind of a weird atmosphere. Zuko was even more sullen and brooding than Mai had remembered, which was nice, but Ty Lee was clearly distraught- obviously _her_ talk with her preordained paramour had gone worse than Mai’s had.

And Azula, for all that she’d kind of ended a hundred year war in a couple of days, and sold by all rights be smugger than she had ever been before, seemed a little annoyed at Mai.

“They’re siblings, you know,” the Princess confided in Mai, whether Mai liked it or not.

“Hmm?”

“The Water Tribals. They’re siblings. Sokka and Katara.” Azula paused. “Sokka is the boy. I’m almost certain.”

Sokka. So now she knew his name. Strike one item off Operation: Don’t Care already, and it had been less than a week. At this rate she’d be marrying him this time next year. “Hmm.”

“You know what that means, of course?”

Mai hazarded a guess. “Water Tribe names are stupid?”

“Well, yes,” Azula conceded, “but what I meant was you and Ty Lee will be _sisters_.”

Mai’s only response was to stare languidly across the deck, to where Ty Lee was pouting mournfully at the sea.

“Well, yes, they will need to be worked on somewhat first, but if destiny has put them in your future, then it really is only a matter of time,” Azula proclaimed, airily. “And besides, there could be worse people to be bound to. They are certainly easy to look at.”

With this, Azula stood waiting expectantly, and Mai realised with a slow dread that she wasn’t getting out of this without giving her _something._

“...His arms are okay,” she mumbled, noncommittally. Azula looked like all her saturnalias had come at once.

It wasn't like it was _that_ big of a deal, Mai reflected. It wasn’t a huge _thing._ So ... _Sokka_ had nice arms. This wasn't that much of a revelation. Nice arms were common. _Mai_ had nice arms. _Zuko_ had nice arms. Even _Azula_ had-

That was not somewhere she wanted to go, Mai decided, stamping down on that train of thought. That was not a safe avenue of inquiry, if only because she wasn’t sure Azula couldn’t read minds.


End file.
